2013 Fall/Winter

Renowned for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, the National Book Award–winning Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti with The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. When Tom Harrington, a humanitarian lawyer, travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape of poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It’s the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, and everyone has secrets. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed, and to make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into a thorny past and his complicated ties to both Jackie and Eville Burnette, a member of the Special Forces who was assigned to protect her. Moving from the violent, bandit-dominated Dubrovnik of World War II to an exquisitely rendered Istanbul in the 1980s, Shacochis draws Jackie’s shadowy family history with daring immediacy. Caught between her first love and the unsavory attentions of her father—an elite spy and quintessential Cold War warrior pressuring his daughter to follow in his footsteps—seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan that puts her on course to becoming the soulless woman that Tom Harrington equally feared and desired. Set over fifty years and in four countries backdropped by different wars, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a magnum opus that brings to life, through the mystique and allure of history, a complex and disturbing story about the coming of age of America in a pre-9/11 world.